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Using Social Network Analysis to Examine Player Interactions in EvE OnlineStefan Slater, Manuel González Canché

Network analysis is an increasingly popular tool for the analysis of rich telemetry data from digital game environments. In this paper we apply social network analysis techniques to the massively multiplayer online game EvE Online in order to examine patterns of player interactions in the game. Data were collected from a one-month period of player versus player interactions in a specific region of the game. In our analyses we conduct analyses of key actors relying on different centrality measures to identify patterns of play in the region. We examine the features and implications of being a ‘key actor’ across these centrality measures in this context, as well as explore applications of this methodology towards game design and research.

Social Talk and Constructing Solutions: Comparing a Teen and Proxy Player in an Educational Alternate Reality GameAnthony Pellicone

An affordance of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) is that players play as-if they were in the game-world themselves. Human game-runners (proxy players) interact with participants as characters within the game’s fiction, guiding and modeling game-play. In this paper we employ a method of analyzing gameplay called Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA), which creates relational network graphs between actions within a game-space. We found that key players exhibited behavior like proxy players, but also diverged from them in meaningful ways. We present case studies of one active player and one proxy player that demonstrate the power of ENA to model ARG play. We describe ways in which ENA reinforced the design insights that guided our original creation of proxy players while also allowing us to analyze the implications of those design choices in practice. We conclude by enumerating some research and design benefits of employing ENA in other learning contexts.

Stefan Slater is an associate research specialist and outreach coordinator at the Games and Learning Society. He graduated with a B.S. in Psychology in 2012 and now studies how students learn from games and how games are used for education.